Comments on: Aiming at Different Audienceshttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/22/aiming-at-different-audiences/
Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:44:00 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1By: Who Are My Readers? Also, AN ANNOUNCEMENT « Galileo's Pendulumhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/22/aiming-at-different-audiences/#comment-75901
Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:21:04 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?p=8222#comment-75901[…] am reassured by Sean Carroll’s candid post in which he addresses criticisms about the level of his book, From Eternity to Here. I admit when I […]
]]>By: Toddhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/22/aiming-at-different-audiences/#comment-75900
Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:22:19 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?p=8222#comment-75900I loved Eternity to Here, and in terms of level approach, my only observation is that I found your explanations through analogy may not have always made the concepts more accessible: for example, as you developed the analogy around where dogs are or aren’t it seemed complex until I realized, “Oh this is wave/particle duality”, which may have been simpler. A very minor comment, overall I felt thrilled with your willingness to build as deep and fast into brain-bendingness as you did.
]]>By: James Goetzhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/22/aiming-at-different-audiences/#comment-75899
Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:51:54 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?p=8222#comment-75899Hey Sean, I ordered your book on Sunday, incidentally the same do you wrote this blog post. I previously read popular physics by Hawking and Penrose and several academic articles with concepts that I could understand regardless that most of the equations flew over my head. And I’m still at the point where I will appreciate a clear introduction to GR and QM. I suppose that I’ll agree with everything you write about that, but disagreement between us might involve the ultimate origin of space with vacuum energy. In any case, I look forward to learning a lot : -)
]]>By: Andyhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/22/aiming-at-different-audiences/#comment-75898
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:55:29 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?p=8222#comment-75898As a follow up, I am a lawyer with no science background beyond the required science-for-liberal-arts majors in college, so perhaps I don’t even make the cut as an aficionado. I probably read one or two science books a year, plus a few blogs such as this one.
]]>By: James Sweethttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/22/aiming-at-different-audiences/#comment-75897
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:28:32 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?p=8222#comment-75897For context, I can give you a general idea of where I am as an “aficianado” of QM: I read this post, and…

* I very much understand the problem to be solved. I am also partial to many-worlds, and was even before beginning From Eternity to Here (I am lifting from Wikipedia when I say it seems to me that wavefunction collapse absolutely must be “just an epiphenomenon of…quantum decoherence”), and in my reading on the subject I understand — though I don’t really have the tools to think about the problem myself — that deriving the Born probability is a problem for MWI. To be honest, I don’t fully grasp why it is not an equally bad problem for Copenhagen and other QM interpretations… but since MWI is the only interpretation that I’ve really been able to grasp in a way that makes sense to me (well, I have a soft spot for instrumentalism, if you can call that an “interpretation”) I guess it’s no surprise that I don’t understand how Born probabilities relate to other interpretations.

* I mostly followed the post itself, but not really in a deep meaningful way. I kinda followed the math, but there are some notations in there which I am very fuzzy on (I’ve never actually done any QM calculations myself, only seen them done), and I didn’t really quite see where the insight was.

* I didn’t follow the discussion in the comments at all. Way above my head.

So there’s some context on the degree of “aficionado” that I may or may not be. FWIW

]]>By: James Sweethttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/22/aiming-at-different-audiences/#comment-75896
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:08:43 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?p=8222#comment-75896Damn, I would have put more time into saying something smarter and more worthwhile if I’d known my little pseudo-review was going to get this kind of visibility! I’m not quite even 2/3 of the way through, so I can’t even rightly call it a “review”… it was just something I noticed.

I don’t at all disagree with this comment from Andy:

Speaking as one of the ‘aficionados’ who has read everything by Brian Greene and others (though not Lisa Randall – I’ll have to look for her) I don’t get tired of the GR and QM introductions. It is difficult enough to grasp that I always seem to gain a little better understanding of it by reading yet another perspective. I’ve read your book, and I think I was able to ‘grok’ about a third of the new stuff.

Indeed, as I mentioned in my “psuedo-review”, I actually very much appreciated the rehash of GR and QM, because although they are familiar concepts, I can’t exactly call it “old hack”.

Overall I think you did a wonderful job at this very difficult balancing act. The blog post was sort of just a random thought I had a little while after reading the explanation of how logarithms work. While having the math-y thinking skills to understand some of the points about entropy is a total separate skill from knowing what a logarithm is, or what scientific notation is, I imagine the subset of people who have the former but not the latter must be rather small.

Nevertheless, it is, as you point out, a very challenging task to balance audiences, and overall I think you did a great job. One thing I noticed — and this was after I wrote the psuedo-review in question, by the way — was that From Eternity to Here generally does an excellent job at drawing together enough context in a sufficiently organized manner that an astute reader is entirely prepared to make the next logical leap before you actually spring it on them. The particular example I am thinking of is your treatment of what you call the Boltzmann-Lucretius scenario. For literally pages before you finally dismantle it, I was practically shouting at the book: “But the most parsimonious cosmology in that case would be Last Thursdayism! And that’s no explanation at all!” This was not a thought that had ever occurred to me before, nor anything remotely like it, but the book does such a fine job at laying out the context in a logical way that I was already seeing some objections to such a scenario, something I most certainly could not have accomplished a few days ago.

That pedagogical approach — where the student is given the tools to see the answer at the instant before you give it to her, rather than having to wait to be told — is IMO the most satisfying, and probably the most effective.

I more or less stand by my blog post, but rest assured, I think this is a great book, and I realize the problem I am nitpicking about is a very challenging one for popular science writers — even more so when the problem being confronted is that nature of time. (I had to abandon Julian Barbour’s The End of Time partway through, because while I grokked many of the early sections, there came a point where I just wasn’t following it anymore… very difficult topic!)

]]>By: Sleethhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/22/aiming-at-different-audiences/#comment-75895
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:05:10 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?p=8222#comment-75895All great minds who strive to put their thoughts into book form should consider leaving two legacies: one version for the general population so they too might glimpse into the heights that the human mind can achieve, even if it pushes that audience with challenging concepts; and another version for the aficionados, and those who want to be aficionados, pushing the author and this audience to the limits of their abilities, so that greater and greater heights in human understanding can be achieved.
]]>By: bybyhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/22/aiming-at-different-audiences/#comment-75894
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:37:25 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?p=8222#comment-75894I absolutely agree that quantum mechanics and special relativity should be part of the high school curriculum. Given that all gadgets and accomplishments in the last 50 years are direct result of these mysterious theories there is no reason why their ideas should not be introduced and investigated and even challenged at the high school level. The ideas are fairly straight-forward and the mathematics is not a killer(after all they are introduced in freshman college classes). The longer the ideas are absorbed and worked with, the more intriguing they become and the more intelligent the quest from investigation can be expected to be. Folks like me who were introduced to these ideas and were told at the opening lecture that QM is extremely hard and I may as well drop the course now, were terrified with respect and fear. This is counter-productive. At the very least we need to help young scientist build historical understanding and intuition for the phenomenon that are being studied and described with the tools and ideas of these theories. There is in general a prevailing fear factor cloud surrounding science and if folks stop scaring kids, even smart kids and smart schools, educated folks will eventually prevail in this country. And this is what we need. The Greeks didn’t educate their kids for the fun of it. They wanted folks who could make decisions and argue their positions. Instead we teach our children to be afraid of knowledge and to be uncertain about their opinions and to believe that knowledge is delivered through a simulation. 100% on with you the ‘modern’ physics in the high school curriculum. (remember kids learn calc early and early on, and why not, once you know a bit of trig and the concepts of area and volume you are set-there is no reason to delay and twist the inevitable and after all the useful). It’s ridiculous to have kids finishing high school who know stuff from 100 years ago and no working knowledge of the advancement from the last 100 years(or at least bare; I think biology has made some advances in that direction, at least conceptually, but there is work there too). As to your book, I could not read it. You lectures cover more or less conceptually the content and verbal lecture is way better to listen to. Further, you are a decent lecturer. Had no idea you were on one of those Nova shows, quite surprising but recognized your diction from two rooms over.Funny indeed.
]]>By: Jim Harrisonhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/22/aiming-at-different-audiences/#comment-75893
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:57:34 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?p=8222#comment-75893Point of information: has anybody done surveys to figure out just who these afictionadoes are? I’ve assumed that a lot of the folks who read popular science books are actually scientists or engineers interested in areas outside their fields or people like me who aren’t scientists but work in the science/technology industry.
]]>By: caoimhhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/22/aiming-at-different-audiences/#comment-75892
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:06:00 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?p=8222#comment-75892As an ‘aficionado’ myself, I enjoy the various explanations of QM/GR that different authors provide. It’s akin to hearing a band cover a song by another artist. The basics are the same but the small differences are what make each one special.
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